eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

Film

08/12/2018

Today’s movie was from the archives; Ingmar Bergman’s 1951 Summer Interlude a movie about the tragedy of losing a first great love in life. The film’s plot is not complicated and its characters, Marie and Henrik, are not complex. A young ballet dancer falls in love with a young college student one summer near the ocean. They converse, they play, they go for walks and swims, and trysts. But Eden is only Eden if you get to stay there forever I guess.

All great loves appear to be one fatal decision away from being obliterated.

Most of the film takes place fifteen years later as Marie makes an attempt to dig herself out of a fifteen year period of mourning. “Now all the clocks in the house have stopped and the flowers in the windows have wilted and died,” she says of life after losing young love. “We were alive in those days, and there were red geraniums and the clocks ticked away.” Several times, Marie speaks of life as over in this same fashion. “Everyone is alive,” she says. “They run around in the streets and here I am eating and drinking.” The psychological term for Marie’s condition is “anhedonia” – an inability to feel the pleasures of life.

The film highlights the problems of life after Eden. Life can seem to have no meaning. Life can seem to have no life. God seems to be dead or antagonistic to you. Decisions seem impossible. “You don’t dare take your makeup off and you don’t dare put it on,” the ballet master says to Marie. “There is only one thing you can do,” Marie’s uncle Earland says to her, “Protect yourself Build a wall around yourself so the misery can’t get to you. I’ll help you. Ill help you build your wall.”

And ultimately, after doing so, Marie realizes that rather than obtaining protection from harm by these walls, she was locked in away from life.

And the movie leaves you with the idea that she may be ready to open up to what life has to offer again.

Question for Comment: What are the causes and cures of anhedonia in your own life?

07/29/2018

I am glad I did not listen to Roger Ebert on this one. This is such a lovely movie about how life can bring you into connection with strangers if you will be open to it. A young man and a young woman sit on a plane with a seat between them. He stares out the window listening to music through his headset, oblivious of her. In a moment of social audacity, she plugs her own earphones into his device so as to listen to his music along with him. Music provides a connection when mixed with a little fearlessness. The secret I guess is not to ask. This is the opening connection that leads to several dozen more connections over the course of the film (many of them are the result of shared music while others are the result of a series of mechanical failures in their van). When you are watching the closing credits, you find yourself reveling in all the adventures they had and the people they met and how each new person they connect with was like a new experiential child or grandchild of that single moment of “social risk” in the plane.

Question for Comment: How open are you to meeting strangers? Are you ever or always the initiator in these connections? Why or why not?

07/28/2018

Sometimes a movie has to be considered in the context of another to be interesting enough for me to write about. The Art of Getting By may be one of them. The central character is a young man in his senior year of high school who isn’t motivated enough to do homework (for a year). My son would call him a “multislacker.” His love interest and peers seem to be entitled rich kids of rather liberal and lost parents.

The basic plot shares a great deal in common with the far better and older film, Some Kind of Wonderful, a film that I have thought highly of for decades. Here are some similarities between the two movies. They both deal with the love lives of high school seniors about to graduate. Both have leading male actors who have overriding interests in art (despite having parents that are less than thrilled about this as a career path). Both films deal with the difficulties of navigating a love interest through class and status-conscious peers. Both have decent musical soundtracks to back up the story. The end of both movies involves a “will she or won’t she?” – slash – “will he or won’t he?” reveal moments. Both films use a painted picture as a statement about love and authenticity. Both films involve teenagers trying to sort themselves out without a great deal of adult help –indeed, adults are the least helpful allies to these children. Both movies make it seem like it is not difficult for a high school student to get admitted to a bar.

But all this is incidental. Here is what both movies say to their target audiences (I assume teenagers in their senior years or thereabout):

Successful coupling takes two vital skills – one is to figure out what you want. Two is to figure out how to say it when you know. What makes successful coupling so truly complicated is that there are at least two people (often more) involved in this messy process and often they are not accomplishing the above two tasks at the same exact times. Sometimes one figures out what they want sooner than the other and sometimes one figures out how to say it sooner than the other.

Both films try to end on happy notes by having all protagonists figure it out eventually.

Perhaps in some people’s real lives, this happens. It is sad to think of how many passionate love relationships were left to decompose because these four moments did not happen on some sort of reasonable timetable.

Question for Comment: When you think of a relationship that worked or did not work in your own life, what was the relationship between these four things: When person A figured out s/he wanted to be with person B; when person B figured out they wanted to be with person A; when person A figured out how to tell person B about the feeling; when person B figured out how to tell person A about the feeling?

07/25/2018

Winter’s Bone is set in a sparse impoverished landscape of despair. People throughout the film seem to be losing their humanity one ethical principle at a time. One gathers that the community has come to the place where all morality is on the table besides kin loyalty. “Dolly’s don’t run,” Rhee Dolly says. And they do not snitch on their family members either. Rhee is a 17 year old girl desperately trying to feed and provide for her two younger siblings and her mother in a shack that stands to be repossessed if she does not find her father or her father’s body and thus avoid the bondsman’s claim on it.

As the movie unfolds, we meet her uncle Teardrop and a whole assortment of relations who have all come a long ways from Sunday School. They cook meth, snort cocaine, threaten their womenfolk with violence, bribe people, murder people, lie to people, and let their neighbors live on squirrels. But they do take that first commandment of thieves and clans seriously: “Thou shalt not betray or abandon your kin.” And as the movie reveals, there is nothing that Rhee won’t do for her little family.

“I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back,” Rhee says to her concerned little brother at the end of the film.

One is struck with just how simplified morality gets when deprivation and poverty tries to drive all vestiges of a more complex moral code out of consideration.

“Dolly’s don’t run.”

That’s the great commandment.

Question for Comment: Over the course of your life, have you added to and strengthened your moral code? Or simplified and made it something much leaner than it was when you started out?

07/16/2018

Fill the Void is one of many movies that you can find about how people go about selecting a partner in life. I suppose the ways that it is done and the reasons it is done for are endless in human history or maybe it all comes down to a few primary colors being mixed in different ways. “Almost everybody in the world gets married,” the stage manager in Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town says “—you know what I mean? In our town there aren’t hardly any exceptions. Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.”

He leaves you wondering if any one of the millions of marriages he has seen is ever anything special.

And yet movies about the subject still intrigue us. We are curious about how the process works or doesn’t work in other people’s lives. This particular movie tells the story in a unique cultural context, the orthodox Jewish community of Tel Aviv. There is one single moment early in the film where you hear some sort of techno music blaring out in the street and the family has the windows closed to make that outside secular world inaudible and you just never hear or see anything of it for the rest of the film. This is a film about marriage in one family whose faith is never in conflict with some secular alternative. The window has closed on the fundamental beliefs underlying the decisions, though the decisions still are not easy.

The basic plot goes something like this; a Jewish man and his wife are pregnant. She goes into labor and delivers the child but dies. The husband and his infant son eventually begin considering remarrying but the only prospect is a widow in Belgium. The child’s grandmother is heartbroken to think that she will be separated from her grandson and suggests the possibility of a marriage between her widowed son-in-law and the dead wife’s younger sister. It is a world of arranged marriages but not forced marriages and the sister, Shira, and her brother-in-law, Yochay have to go through a process of deciding if this would be a good idea for them or a bad idea.

Shira is caught between her desire to play her role as a dutiful daughter, sister, and aunt while considering her own romantic feelings or lack of feelings as an eighteen year old woman about to enter marriage to some arranged partner herself. She knows her brother-in-law is a good man. She does not really know anything about the potential husband whose family has expressed interest in her from a distance. She has seen the young man in a grocery store secretly that is about it. She is ambivalent about marrying an older man and the husband of her sister but there is just so much that she does not know about her option or about Yochay outside of what her mother and father might prefer.

Yochay tries to ask her how she feels and she can only respond by articulating what she thinks she should do. “Stop disappearing,” he says. Which is sort of ironic given the way that this community tends to “disappear” women from a lot of important transactions of this sort. Though Shira is told that her opinion matters and is important, she cannot fail to get the message that her feelings should not matter. It is no wonder that she disappears. “How can we speak face to face until we have faces?” C.S. Lewis once asked.

Eventually, the rabbi is consulted about the matter. “How does the girl feel about this match?” he asks her father. Shira speaks up for herself (imagine!) and answers.

“It is not a matter of feelings.”

“It is only a matter of feelings,” the rabbi responds.

“A deed must be done and I want to do it to everyone’s satisfaction,” Shira tells him, thinking that is what she is supposed to say.

The Rabbi shakes his head and repeats her name several times and then issues his pronouncement: “Rabbi Nachman of Breslev says that blessed is he who says one word of truth to the Almighty his entire life.”

I don’t want to give away the ending because it is a movie that different people will react to in different ways. What Yochay decides, what Shira decides, and whether their decisions will work out in the end all are left to the viewer’s imagination. What cannot be avoided when all is said and done is the need in these complicated emotional cases of pairing for honesty, for self understanding, and for time.

“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” Lao Tse says in the Dao Te Ching, “Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”

I know people who could not do exactly that.

It is a hard long lesson to have to learn.

Question for Comment: When you consider the pairings you have made in life and you reflect upon whether or not they were good ones or poor ones, what is it that you think was the cause of the end result? Sufficient or insufficient knowledge of yourself, sufficient or insufficient knowledge of the partner? Or just sufficient or insufficient time?

07/08/2018

“Don’t raise your voice. Men don’t like women who raise their voices.”

These are the first lines of the movie, spoken by an older woman who is pulling the hair off some other woman’s legs.

The film establishes the assertion of the first sentence as true but then tells women to defy the advice of the second sentence. The film narrates the stories of three women rooming together in Tel Aviv. Laila is a wild-living lawyer who loves to party. Salma is a D.J and part time bar-tender who is a closet lesbian. Nur is a conservative Muslim woman studying to be a computer scientist while preparing for her marriage to a *very* Mulsim man. Laila is about as secular as they come. Salma is from a Christian family in Nazareth. Nur is from a Muslim family from the conservative town of Umm al-Fahm. All three have to deal with men in their lives and all of the men are exemplary of patriarchal values to different degrees. Laila’s new boyfriend is liberated on the outside but he wants Laila to pretend to be less liberated than she is when she is with his family. Salma’s father approves of his daughter being selective about the men that he suggests for her to consider marrying but he violently opposes her lifestyle when it becomes apparent that she is gay. Nur’s fiancé wants Nur to give up her studies and her living arrangements (when he discovers how un-religious her roommates are). None of the key male characters in the story appreciate the liberation that these three otherwise different women all assert eventually.

The last scene of the film has the three women standing together – each of them very different in their beliefs and approaches to life. Each of them appears to be single now. Each of them seems to be pensively trying to figure out if there is a place on this planet where they can live with men at all. As if to say that men still do not like women who raise their voices.

Question for Comment: Who in your life give you the most freedom to be yourself? Who gives you the least?

06/28/2018

I did not realize it while I was watching it but this film is a subtle retelling of the well loved Tom Hanks – Meg Ryan classic You Got Mail – only set in India and sans internet. Through a providential mix-up, home-made lunches are delivered to the wrong office in Mumbai and as a result, a correspondence develops between an about-to-be-retired insurance claims adjuster and the housewife who makes his delivered lunches. In a matter of days, it becomes clear that the notes they leave each other in the lunchbox as it is passed back and forth through a currier each and every working day become more important to them than the food in them. “Man shall not live by bread alone” all the saints have told us. And its true. We live on attention, on gratitude, on hope, on appreciation, on connection. And on notes from mysterious strangers with romantic potential it appears.

It is that connection that we so crave that is at the very core of this movie. Fernandes and Illia – one a widower and the other a neglected housewife of a husband who is having an affair – over the course of a few days - go from communicating about the salt content of the meals she makes to the state of their respective hearts. All of their communication is condensed to pieces of paper that they leave under the Na’an bread in his daily lunch buckets.

Slowly, slowly, the inevitable question arises: should they actually meet?

An attempt is made.

I won’t spoil the movie for you but I can say that it all comes down to a risk-laden moment when the two of them have to come to grips with what life alone or “not-alone-but-lonely” will mean for them.

Watching the two of them was like watching two people on the trapeze, trying to get over their fear of heights at the same time so that it might be possible to catch each other in their respective falls. The ending reminds the viewer that finding love in life requires a providential assistance but no amount of that commodity will compensate for the courage required to say to oneself, “perhaps I am worth the chance.”

“No one wants yesterday’s lottery tickets,” Fernandes says to her in one of his last notes.

I take back what I said at the beginning of this post. Only the beginning of this movie was You Got Mail. The ending was all Thomas Hardy.

Question for Comment: What is a risk of the heart that you have been unwilling or unable to take lately?

06/04/2018

The film Phantom Thread presents us with the story of a marriage between two people who live out their relationship with tactics that most people use to fight wars. Reynolds Woodcock is rude, insufferably controlling, and narcissistic while she is soft, gentle, and yet ruthlessly intractable. It seems clear that Reynolds cares about his work about 99% of the time and he cares about the woman in his life about 1% of the time. I gather that Alma loves his dedication to his work but is not about to let him get away with seeing her as his toy.

“If you want to have a staring contest with me,” Alma says early in their relationship, “you will lose.” As the movie unfolds, you realize that he should have taken her far more seriously than he did at the time.

Reynolds is a widely acclaimed dress –maker who produces work for British royalty and women if significant wealth. His work involves making dresses for singular people for their singularly important occasions and we are given to understand that he is well paid for his work. He is, as they say, “at the top of his game” and he is used to be regarded as royalty himself (“The House of Woodcock” is how people refer to his boutique and he is not above taking your dress back from you if you act in some low-brow way while wearing it).

Reynolds invites Alma to stay in his home and work with him as a sort of one tenth girl-friend – nine tenths dressmaker’s assistant. She is allowed to sit at the breakfast table but she is not allowed to butter her toast loudly, move, make noise, or ask for conversation. Everything she makes for him has to be made to exact specifications and he refuses to make adjustments without making his displeasure about doing so clear.

“Reynolds: As I think you know, Alma, I prefer my asparagus with oil and salt. And knowing this, you've prepared the asparagus with butter. Now, I can imagine in certain circumstances being able to pretend that I like it made this way. Right now, I'm just admiring my own gallantry for eating it the way you've prepared it.”

“If it’s my life you don’t agree with, then you don’t have to share it,” he says. “I cannot start my day with a confrontation. I simply have no time for confrontations.”

All my-way-or-the-highway.

As he is with his clients, he is with her (“The fabric is right because it’s right. Maybe one day you’ll change your taste.”)

Her response is what makes the movie so thought provoking. “If you want to have a staring contest with me,” she had warned him, “you will lose.”

And she meant it.

Question for Comment: What is the best response to a controlling person in your life? To fight with them for control or a share of it? Or to simply evacuate and let them live in their own loneliness?

05/25/2018

Every once in a while, someone comes along who decides not to be cautious with the throttle when they live their life. Gertrude Bell deserves a place on this list. The movie portrays her as unwilling to settle for anything less than a life of aventure and by the time she was done, there was hardly anything *but adventure* in the fabric she wove of that single supply of time that we all draw from. She meets someone who seems to love the same sort of life she does but ... he fails to meet her father's measurements for an appropriate marriage.

"Love is lawless," he says. "Don't go."

She does (the mistake that Rousseau warns of in Ou la nouvelle Héloïse ).

And for the rest of her life she concludes that "love was not ment for me."

The same cannot be said for adventure. She learnes languages and travels extensively in the Middle East as a writer, an archaeologist, and an eventual consultant to the British government. We owe the modern day countries of Iraq and Jordan much to her work. I have wondered somedays, had I been the child of a wealthy industrialist as Gertrude Bell was, would I have taken a similar path. Perhaps I shall never know as ... I wasn't.

05/06/2018

“THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged …” Edgar Allen Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Sometimes I think the whole world would benefit from watching more movies made in the Middle East. There are so many of them that speak deeply to the human condition and how we all act somewhat less than ourselves when we are in conflict or when we live with trauma and potential scarcity. In the film, The Insult and altercation between a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refuge in Beirut threatens to unravel the tenuous threads that so loosely bind the fragile social structure of an Arab country.

The entire plot pivots on a central question: When can a context of trauma and stress be used as a defense for a lack of empathy or kindness? Or for a provocative insult or an act of physical aggression?

While it is difficult to sort out just who should be blamed and how much, it becomes apparent that the solution lies in a willingness to listen and to explain and then to empathize and express regret for what you did not know. And there is probably always something that you did not know.

This is one of my favorite movies on the Middle East now and I hope a lot of people watch it – and particularly if you are angry at someone or some group of people for something that has been done that you think has been done out of sheer disrespect.

Question for Comment: To what extent is a person owed some toleration for poor behavior when that behavior is the result of some trauma in their past lives or suffering in their present?